NASA Animates a Flight Over Dwarf Planet Ceres

NASA’s camera team at Germany’s national aeronautics and space research center (CLR) did a fantastic job animating a flight over dwarf planet Ceres from the perspective of Dawn, a tiny unmanned spacecraft that entered Ceres’ orbit last spring. Located in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (310 million miles from Earth) Ceres has a lot of prominent craters, which you can see in the video along with their names as well as mountains.

Ceres notably has some mysterious bright spots which scientists speculate is some kind of frozen substance. The video has enhanced color to indicate areas that scientist think are younger or made of different mineral, so while the real planet might not be quite as colorful, it gives us a glimpse at the variation of material Ceres’ surface in addition to looking really cool. What did you think of the animation?

(via Popular Science)

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